Sister Bernadette's Barking Dog by Kitty Burns Florey

I learned it in the sixth grade from Sister Bernadette.

It breaks the record.” But Wilkie Collins called Cooper “the greatest artist in the domain of romantic fiction in America.”Įven in my own youth, many years after 1877, diagramming was serious business. When it was introduced in an 1877 text called Higher Lessons in English by Alonzo Reed and Brainerd Kellogg, it swept through American public schools like the measles, embraced by teachers as the way to reform students who were engaged in (to take Henry Higgins slightly out of context) “the cold-blooded murder of the English tongue.” By promoting the beautifully logical rules of syntax, diagramming would root out evils like “him and me went” and “I ain’t got none,” until everyone wrote like Ralph Waldo Emerson, or at least James Fenimore Cooper.1ġ I’m thinking here of Mark Twain’s famous and still highly entertaining essay, “Fenimore Cooper’s Literary Offenses,” in which Twain concludes that “in the restricted space of two-thirds of a page, Cooper has scored 114 literary offenses out of a possible 115. and what diagrams of sentences by Hemingway, Welty, Proust, Kerouac and other famous writers reveal about them.įlorey also offers up her own common-sense approach to learning and using good grammar.Diagramming sentences is one of those lost skills, like darning socks or playing the sackbut, that no one seems to miss. the inferior 'balloon diagram' predecessor. Now, in this illustrated personal history that any language lover will adore, Kitty Burns Florey explores the rise and fall of sentence diagramming, including its invention by a mustachioed man named Brainerd 'Brainy' Kellogg and his wealthy accomplice Alonzo Reed.

But are we that much worse for not knowing the word-mapping method? Once wildly popular in grammar schools across the country, sentence diagramming has fallen out of fashion. Richard Russo, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Empire Falls 'Kitty Burns Florey seems to write from a great wellspring of inner calm that derives from a gleeful appreciation of life's smallest details.'

Sister Bernadette's Barking Dog by Kitty Burns Florey